Monday, October 31, 2016

I used to work as a 911
operator in a large urban area. One night shift I worked, at around 3:00 a.m.,
I answered a call from an elderly woman.

She told me she didn’t feel
well. I tried several times to illicit more information from her. Was she
having chest pains, trouble breathing etc.?

The only response I got was
her stating over and over again she was not feeling well. She did give her
address and phone number. She also volunteered that she was alone and her front
door was unlocked.

She said when the paramedics
arrived they should walk right in.

I put the call out as a
“general illness” and continued to talk to her. After several minutes she told
me in a weak voice, “ I don’t feel well.” She then stated, “She needed to go to
the bathroom.”

I tried to encourage her to
stay on the line but I heard her put the phone down. Every few minutes I called
her name but received no response.

Eventually a firefighter whom
had been dispatched to the callers’ home came on the line. He asked if the call
had come in from a third party or family member. I replied “no.”

He sounded puzzled as he told
me they had found an elderly lady in the bathroom. I told him that was the lady
who had made the call. He slowly stated “no” and then informed me that the lady in
the bathroom had been dead for at least 12 hours. That rigor had set in.

Afterwards my supervisor and
I pulled the tapes on this call to see if I had missed something. We checked
the timestamp, address and phone number. No one else was in the home.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

I was the first female
custodian to be hired at the city’s oldest elementary school in the late 1970s.
The original part of the school had been built in 1893.

The building was very large
with 3 stories. My job was to clean all the classrooms,
take out the trash and make sure the doors were secure.

I was to work the night shift
alone and the first day I reported to work I was warned that I should avoid
cleaning the ground floor after dark. This floor made up the original school.

No explanation was given as to
why I was told this.

For the first few months I
went out of my way to make sure I cleaned this floor first but I found I
preferred to start at the top floor and work my way down.

I enjoyed working in the
quiet old school building. Like most old structures this one creaked and
groaned as it settled but I actually took comfort from these sounds.

The ground floor of the school
retained an old world charm. Several of the classrooms still had the mosaic
designed floors and the fireplaces that once had been their only source of
heat.

Each of these ground floor
classrooms had windows that were below ground so each window had what is a
called a window well around them.

One winter night I was in the
largest of these original classrooms. I had gotten a strong sense of sadness in
this room each time I entered it.

This night I placed a chair
in the doorway of this classroom so I could dust the ledge above the door. I
turned to find a dust cloth and when I turned back the chair was no longer in
the doorway but sat several feet away.

I thought it was odd but I
shrugged it off and moved the chair back to the doorway and started to dust the
wood. I stopped when I heard the sounds of small children crying and then I
heard banging on the windows.

Frightened, I got off the
chair and my first thought was to leave the room but when the sounds continued
I approached the windows thinking someone must be hiding in one of the window
wells.

As I drew near these sounds
all stopped.

For the next several months
when I cleaned this room, I continued to hear the crying and banging on the
windows. At one point I called the police but they did not find any
sign of intruders.

I did not talk about what I
was experiencing with other school employees but I now firmly believed the
school must be haunted. I dealt with my frayed nerves by simply ignoring the
strange activity.

The first summer I worked at
the school my schedule was switched to days. One hot afternoon as I weeded the
yard two older women who lived across the street from the school approached me
and offered me a glass of lemonade.

As I drank the cold drink I
found out the two women were sisters and both widows, they had moved back into
their family home. The older sister mentioned that the school had certainly
changed since they had attended it.

Thinking of the noises I had
heard, I asked them if they knew of anything bad ever happening at the school.
They both eagerly nodded their heads “yes.”

The older one who seemed to do
all the talking told me that their family had lived across from the school for
several generations. Their grandfather had attended the school in the late
1800s.

Our grandfather told us that
one day one teacher left her classroom for a dalliance with a male teacher. To
ensure none of her students left the classroom she wedged a chair under the
classroom doorknob.

While she was gone an ember
from the fireplace set the classroom on fire. Her young students trapped, all
perished in the fire. The younger sister jumped in at this point.

“They say the windows in the
room afterwards had to be replaced. The youngsters had beaten on them so hard
that they were stained with blood. This blood wouldn’t wash off.”

A chill ran down my back as I
asked what happened to the teacher. The older sister told me that she was never
seen again. Again the younger sister interrupted.

“Have you seen them? The
children I mean. Have you heard them?”

Just then the head custodian
hollered that I needed to get back to work. Lost in my thoughts, I remembered
to thank the sisters for the lemonade as they crossed the street.

Fall came and once more I was
working the night shift. I could never keep a chair in the doorway of the sad
classroom very long and knowing what I now knew I never closed the door.

The sounds of the crying and
banging started up once more. I decided to try and talk to these young ghosts.
I told them that their parents were waiting for them and they should go.

This seemed to help because
after this I heard fewer voices crying.

Then one night as I was
working on the 2nd floor I was saved from an injury or even death.
As I approached one classroom I heard a strange squeaking above my head. I
looked up but saw nothing.

As I stepped over the
threshold I heard a child’s voice yell, “No.” Then something shoved me backward
with such force I fell on my bottom. It was then a loud crashing noise came
from the classroom.

The heavy overhead lights had fallen to the ground. Plaster from the ceiling covered the desks and floor. I
started to shake realizing what a close call I had. I was grateful school was
not in session.As I sat on the ground I felt
two little arms encircle my waist giving me a hug. I whispered, “thank you” and
then ran to a phone to report the damage.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

I wrote a post about how ghosts sometimes appear as imaginary friends to young children here.Four years ago I
read about a teenage girl named Jamie who had an imaginary friend when she was
a young child while living in a small town in Maine. To this day she wonders if
her imaginary friend when she was eight years old was actually a spirit. She
and her mom lived in a rural area of Maine called Old Town. She spend a lot of
time at her grandmother’s house on the edge of this town because her mother, a
widow had to work.

Jamie mentions that it is her
mother that likes to tell the story for she barely remembers her “imaginary
playmate”. She does remember that she loved to play in a cemetery that was
just a half-mile down a side dirt road from her Grandmother’s home. She would
ride her bike and take fresh picked flowers to place on her father’s grave for
he was buried there. She remembered that she often sat on a an tree stump and made up stories about the people in this old
cemetery. She also played a game to see if she could memorize all the names of the people who lay beneath the slanted tombstones. Most of these stones were marked from the 1830’s to the early
1900s.

She mentioned she no longer
remembered these names but that she does vaguely remember an Anglo boy named Tom who
was about ten years old that she played with on the dirt road and in the
cemetery. She remembered asking him why he wore the same clothes every time she
saw him--jeans and a button down shirt. She also remembers he had curly brown
hair. Her mother hearing about this “Tom” she played with concluded he must be
an imaginary friend for there wasn’t a young boy named Tom, or any children in
the rural area where her mother lived.

Often when she would pick up
Jamie after work she would listen to stories about her day. When Jamie
mentioned Tom she would just play along and ask her questions.One day when
Jamie mentioned how much fun it was to play with Tom she asked Jamie where Tom
lived. Jamie replied, “Oh he lives in the graveyard”. Thinking her daughter
didn’t understand her question she tried again. “You mean you play with him in
the graveyard?” To her surprise Jamie told her, “We always play in the
graveyard because that is where Tom lives”.

Her mother now wondering
about the oddness of her daughter’s response encouraged her not to go the graveyard so often. Jamie remembers she ignored her mother’s request and
continued to play with Tom for another year. She continued to talk about him but her mother found it creepy so she stopped. As a
young teen she couldn’t find the name of anyone named Tom in this cemetery that
has around 70 tombstones but later she discovered that in Old Town there is a
record of a boy named Thomas who died and was buried on July 18, 1882.